We decided a few weeks ago that PubSubHubbub would be our HTTPAPI and it’s been a great choice for us as many developers have started to work on language specific libraries to interact with hubs.

Today, we’re announcing that not only we’re a hub, but we’re also a subscriber. In other terms, it means that whenever a feed indicates a hub, Superfeedr will subscribe to this hub to get updates from it in real-time. That is a great addition to our set of helpers and it will hopefully help us improve yet again our detection time of new entries.

At a broader level, it is interesting to compare PubSubHubbub with previous initiatives, and, as far as I know, PubSubHubbub is the first one to actually enable easily this “federation” structure (similar to what XMPP offers), where subscribers can select their favorite hubs and hubs can communicate together to provide updates to all their users.

It makes the PubSubHubbub “network” even more decentralized and scalable/fault-resistant. For those into graph theory, you will immediately see the benefit of such an architecture : virtually ubiquitous new data publication, as long as there is a (not too long) path from any node to any other node!